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The social media team at the National Football League is on a mission to be “the most youth-driven and community-driven platform and league” in the world. It aims to do this by using platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat, as well as gaming platforms including Roblox and Fortnite, to build and engage with future fans and audiences as they find the sport in new ways. The league also looks to its players to contribute to that creator engagement strategy.
And because sport offers a global entry point, it can drive diverse and inclusive attitudes and behaviors, explained Sam Fink, director of content partnerships for the NFL, during a panel at Social Media Week.
Fink spoke alongside Meeckel Beecher, global head of diversity, equity and inclusion for Shutterstock, as they shared their views on developing accessible social media content strategies.
Fink outlined the NFL social media team’s “Helmets Off” strategy, which allows audiences to see and hear from players away from the game, giving them a platform to share their stories.
“It’s a global game. We have teams all over the country. We’re bringing millions of people together on a weekly basis, and a fan really can be anyone. Football is for everyone. So when we’re making our marketing materials and social content, we want our fans to see themselves,” continued Fink.
Meanwhile, media-sharing content business Shutterstock’s contributor community is also a global one, with more than a million people.
Beecher highlights the business’ Diversity Marketing Report—last published in 2021—which examines how brands are thinking about diversity in the content they produce, having discovered the insight that people are always “trying to find a connection” from the content they consumer. But marketers have admitted that their output has not been good enough in the past.
“I think, in addition to ensuring that the marketing team is diverse, one of the things that we recognize is that we have to bring our contributors to the forefront of our social space to ensure that people recognize that there is actual diversity behind the people who are creating the content, because that’s how you get authentic authenticity,” he said.
Social and diversity strategies should be the same thing
In terms of how brands can embed their DEI strategy within their comms, Beecher said that the development of any strategy should not take place separately from representation plans, both internally and externally.
“You need to ensure that how you’re thinking about your communities, that you’re catering to a larger group of people. Naturally, you’re going to have targets that you need to think about. But one of the things that we’ve been pushing at Shutterstock, in terms of how we arrange our content … let’s say instead of having ‘LGBTQ families,’ we just have ‘families.’ And within that collection of families, you have LGBTQ people, you have people with a disability, you have multigenerational families, because that’s how people exist,” he explained.